1. Technical Field
This invention relates to telecommunications service provider and telecommunication operator system architectures. In particular, this invention relates to maintaining and providing efficient access to both static and dynamic telecommunication subscriber profile information.
2. Related Art
Rapid advances in computer system and telecommunications technology have lead to a vast array of telecommunication services available to the consumer. Such telecommunications services include traditional telephone service, Internet service, cable television service, cellular phone service, messaging service, paging service, combined voice and data delivery service, and many other services. Furthermore, many services may be either wireless or wireline based.
Telecommunications subscribers access their services through a wide range of connections. The hardware underlying the connections implements circuit switched connections, packet switched connections, and other types of connections. In addition, a wide range of communication protocols and access technologies further govern the transfer of data on the connections. Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS), Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), and other technologies are several examples of a wide array of access technologies for telecommunications services.
Growing support of new and existing telecommunications services and the wide range of access mechanisms for those services have led to an extensive dispersal of subscriber profile information between many different telecommunication support systems which support the services and access mechanisms. The dispersal leads to the inefficient proliferation of custom interfaces between systems and applications which need to obtain profile information to authorize or authenticate access, determine which services are subscribed, determine how the subscriber connects to the services, and for many other reasons. Thus, in the past there was no sufficiently secure, flexible, and efficient mechanism which provided a single point of access to telecommunication subscriber profile information and which maintained the subscriber profile information.
A need has long existed for an enhanced system architecture for a telecommunications service provider or telecommunications operator which efficiently provides access to and maintains subscriber profile information.